Creating a Windchill Dev Environment for Testing

[tjerome]

Does anyone have a best practice set of guidelines for creating a dev environment for testing and also upgrading Windchill? I have two dev environments, one is sandboxed into a private LAN that has no ingress/egress with my Prod environment. I have three servers in each windchill instance running windows server 2019 : an application PDM Link 11.1 server, An oracle 19c server also running windows, and a publisher server running creo parametric 7.0.6.0 also on Windows 2019. The problem is that the data on it is old, I basically created from a VMware clone that was renamed and given new network private assignments. Getting data into and out of this sandbox is problematic. The other dev environment is on the same LAN as my Prod environment, i use different host names and the dev server has a host file with aliases in them to redirect. The problem is I cant find a satisfactory and safe way where both PROD and DEV can be turned on and coexist on the same LAN. Does anyone else here do this without interference between their PROD and DEV Windchill environments on the same LAN?  

Thanks in advance...

[ML_10533213 · Accepted solution]

This is a really good and important question.
The answer is to "rehost" rather than copy the server.  Rehost copies all the configurations, settings and files, but to a different host.  It's intended to have both on the same LAN.

Please look up and learn about rehosting and the rehost utility.

Note: The utility covers several related processes - focus on "Rehost Scenario Process."

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS162685

General process:

- Rehost your Production system to your DEV system

- Make changes / test on DEV

- Make those changes in Production

- After a while, as needed, rehost again and restart the cycle

[tjerome]

Thank you for this excellent information I will study this and let you know what the results are. Funny isnt it how much faster and responsive we can get answers here than through mainstream support?Thanks again folks!

[TomU]

Rehosting is pretty simple once you get the process configured.  Fundamentally it's nothing more than copying the Windchill installation and database to different servers and then running the rehost utility to update a bunch of properties on the rehosted system.  The hardest part of the process is getting the rehost.properies file properly configured.  Fortunately that's a one-time occurrence.

[avillanueva]

I know you have a solution but perhaps this might help. Typically my DEV environment is an empty system with little data. There is no need in my opinion to carry the weight of all that production data for development. They have different hostnames obviously so they can co-exist but read below for a neat way to circumvent that. Test is a clone of production (app, vaults and DB) to a snapshot. This would be periodically updated. 

For data transfer, I suggest you create a devops environment with a process on how changes move from dev to test to prod. I use JIRA to track tickets and BitBucket for my source control of customizations. My coding is done on my laptop (windows) and transferred to the different instances ONLY via the git repositories through correct branch. Production is synced with master branch. 

For rehosting, we opted for a reverse proxy. Internally, PDMLink and its webserver have a generic hostname. This allows cloning of the system without having to change hostnames all over the place. The only place I need to change is the proxy to make a "new" instance. We've had many corp name changes over the years so we expect future change.